Urayoan Noel

SPIC TRACTS

I'm the Puerto Rican
Whose dad is a gringo
Whose mom is a Platonist
Whose pain won't buy platanos
Who drinks toasted almond
Who can't speak the lingo
Who made it to Stanford
Without knowing Windows
except for the ones on this
car service soapbox
that takes me uptown
thru the storefronts of a foreign land,
houses of ancestors I don't recognize.

I've got no friends named Papo
who hang around street corners
"Vaya, mami" and "Boricua one hundred percent,
represent!"
Don't even have a car
to wash on Sunday afternoons
away those NY/PR blues
no homeboy convoy to loot Loisaida
listening to la Fania
"salsa vieja por mi madre por la radio"

Without no toothless grandma
in El barrio
choking on those mounds
of freeze-dried mofongo
the way it never was
because my real grandma
pops Xanax in the suburbs
and dreams of final hours
a whitewash apocalypse to do
away with viral strip mall cosmos.

I spend the summers at my aunt's
in Hialeah,
I'm not down with the program
and I never met Mumia
still,
I have a past
It just doesn't have me-
I have an ethnicity
(in halves)
Yeah, the big city
curiosity
ani-
    fuckin'-
mosity!

And now a jazz interlude:
                    (in the background, Mingus plays)
I've got me a bebop prosody
A jazzbo poesy
A free form soapbox sound off,
But only 'cause I can't sing
Paranoid and blow your slacker brains out

be patient, I'm turning the corner

Don Quixote,
when backed into a corner,
told the fuzz
  "Yo se quien soy,"
I know who I am.
Truth was he didn't
as he charged,
spear-in-hand,
to get the bad guys boned and gutted-
and neither do I
with my hand down my pants
and neither do you,
Papi paid for you to live under the bridge,
Mother nature for a fridge,
you tell me how proud you are
your heritage
                                ("ven mama, ven titi:
                                look at the scars of my victim identity!")

I knew you were reekin'
In your poets cafe
So I covered my nose
And left you with the hobos.

If it's true that the masses are asses
then the poet is their wipe
the best pages are always dirty from life
make ya dizzy from the vapors,
  (think of Vachel Lindsay spinning words like wheels,
    Pablo de Rokha injecting his telegraphy of hope...

they knew there never was no garden.)
In the beginning we were all full of it
When we ate the apple it was candy-coated crap,
So whoever amongst you is pure
may he cast the first stone
or get stoned
and go home
‘cause I know where you live,
but I’m not selling this sermon door-to-door.
but I'm not selling this sermon door-to-door.

c.2000